Ideally, the comment system should be either self-hosted or more fediverse-like. The rest is a temporary compromise that will sink in the sands of time.
And instances seem to be pretty heavy on resources. Reminds me of why Matrix never really took off, running a Matrix server is just too difficult and time-consuming for what you get out of it.
I know proponents of Mastodon will point out that you can work around these warts, but I don't want to. I don't think the model is suited for me.
I have also explored other P2P approaches and built prototype social networks. I prefer a more P2P approach, I think it's more scalable, but it's complicated because IP privacy by default is important in large social networks. I'm still searching for the right solution. I think the advances in LLMs are going to help do a much better job at solving the moderation problem in social networks, and so I am experimenting with that in my off time.
Social media needs to be very simple for the masses to adopt. The elevator pitch needs to be one sentence and must not include the word “server”.
Unless you're Discord, who got away with it by redefining "server" to mean something else.
I don't understand the knee-jerk reactions whenever Mastodon comes up here. Someone always has to declare it dead, someone always has to rant about "leftist politics" and "fascist moderators." And then they usually suggest Nostr which is far more dead than Mastodon.
Nothing is perfect - Mastodon does have its rough edges - but even a moderately successful breakaway from mainstream social media is worth celebrating. I remember when the consensus on HN was that any alternative to the mainstream would be impossible, doomed to fail. The fediverse has its community and its identity, it isn't a flash in the pan.
Active users are measured in different ways by different platforms, so if we compare registered users, fedi has 12.5M compared to 42M for Bluesky. So it's approximately 25% of the size.
It's not the best place to go if you want to get a large following, and it's not Serious Business, but as a user that's not what I want from a social platform. I have plenty of people to follow who are talking about things that interest me.
You're welcome to come have a look if you want, but otherwise no worries. We're doing fine. Maybe you'll check it out sometime when some drama happens at Bluesky. The fediverse is not going away any time soon.
Edit to remove unintended flame bait.
* CF worker on a subdomain that handles POST requests. Basically, a JS function that handles incoming requests.
* It stores comments in CF KV and sends me a copy to telegram
* All I need to do is copy it to Markdown (can be automated, but I manually approve the comments in case of spam)
* In Markdown, I'm using frontmatter to store arbitrary JSON data
* To avoid automated spam, I have a few tricks: do not expose the submit URL in HTML (insert it via JS) and calculate a simple checksum so that automated software that does not execute JS won't be able to post. Such software usually targets Wordpress blogs by scraping them from Google. I get zero spam from it.
Everything, including hosting and workers, costs me zero.
Example: https://rushter.com/blog/zsh-shell/
Your setup sounds cool. Do you host it on a home lab or something?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Yeah, well, you kind of are special.
(*) the entire post, not a excerpt and link to another platform
(*) long posts - posts need to be the size of stack overflow questions
(*) code blocks - it's a tech questions, posters need to be able to post code
(*) screenshots - posters need to be able to post pictures of what's wrong.
(*) serving a static site - I don't want to run a server so a script with an iframe is best. Though it would be nice if they had a message protocol for sizing.
(*) good a blocking/dealing with spam - it should be good at blocking spam. It should be easy to deal with 1000 spam messages should it ever happen. If I have to manually delete them one at a time then no.
(*) free - haha. the stuff I write is open source. I don't want to have to pay on top of my time.
(*) a sustainable business model - not sure what this means except my impression of things like giscus is they either require a server (see above), or they're running the service at a loss so it will probably eventually die.
(*) editable by mod - the posts need to be useful to other users and often posters mis-format
I don't use anything related to github because I expect github will eventually disallow this. I would consider using github if github itself offered the service. Github has one of the best UIs for tech question IMO. Markdown, drag and drop images, drag and drop video, large message size.
I use disqus because even though it sucks, it mostly checks all of those boxes. It's worst part is code blocks. It supports them but they are hard to use.
I looked into things like giscus and utterance. They both require a server or you trusting that they'll run theirs forever. They also use that ludicris "Act on your behalf" BS github permissions system.
I did something similar, but with GitHub Discussions because my blog is hosted on GitHub Pages and composited with Hugo, and I wanted all components to run as close as possible to one another: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...
pmb•1h ago